Sediments of Design

  This dissertation critically engages with the concept of locally based design by dovetailing the importance of understanding different forms of histories with the significance of analyzing layered power dynamics. While the approach to locally based  design considers notions of history and power, it is not theorized through the everyday  lives of working, transpacific, diasporic communities who are designing against legacies of the Cold War in the US. Through this research, I trace the worldbuilding  practices of working (undocumented) Korean immigrants and the politics of their practices in local immigrant economies in Los Angeles, CA. The intention of this work is to inform ways designers in the civic space can practice differently so that local  knowledge production, sociopolitical organizing, and worldbuilding practices  increasingly gain autonomy in determining a justice-oriented configuration of their locale.

 Through fieldwork in Los Angeles(US), Seoul (SK), and GwangJu (SK), I situate Los  Angeles as a carceral, deindustrialized, xenophobic, and imperialistic landscape. Through careful analysis, I trace the ways working, transpacific, diasporic designers in  Los Angeles navigate layered landscapes of power dynamics as they sustain a  justice-orientation in an era of local political turmoil. This accounting includes layered  histories of systemically invisibilized legacies as well as the ways this community contested attempts to structurally obscure their lived realities. Through this work, I argue to decenter the development of new frameworks that aim to "design better" and, rather, a turn towards creating tools that inform design ethics, regulation,  accountability, and analysis.  

Moreover, through this research, I use the metaphor of sediments of design to  emphasize the layered power dynamics that are embedded in all approaches to design  prompting an analysis of individual, existing, and burgeoning design frameworks. To  act upon this prompting and apply this concept, I provide theoretical, analytical, and  pedagogical references for justice-focused designers in the civic space. These tools equip designers with ways to elevate local worldbuilding practices and account for  systemically invisibilized transnational and transpacific power dynamics in their  US-based, geopolitically-aware, justice-oriented design practices.